By: Peter Sagnella
In spring the promise
was first fissures:
light that splintered chinks
in warping boards,
dirt floor thawing like a pond,
stabs of gasoline, manure.
In a rifting, acrid blackness,
I waited the shaping.
Outside the shed, sharp
under dawn’s nimbus,
fumes spiraled like nebulae,
harrows wheeled like galaxies.
He stood ready, set by the machine,
to gash. Together
they clawed rime-splotched earth
while I followed
with windfall stick
poking into clods, feeling surfaces
break, the dark clots of matter
that would one day
burst into loam.
Peter Sagnella lives in North Haven, Connecticut, where he has taught Composition, Poetry, and Environmental Literature for eighteen years. His work has appeared in many journals, most recently Borderlands, New Haven Review, Kestrel, SLANT, and The Comstock Review, and is forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015, and was Edwin Way Teale Writer-in-Residence at Trail Wood in 2017.
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